The Adobe community is busy fiddling with Wave, a beta project recently released for evaluation by Adobe (although the pre-announcement came in at last year’s Adobe MAX). Wave is an AIR application and, on the flip side, a service hosted by Adobe that allows users to stay tuned by receiving immediate push notifications right on the desktop from the content publishers who have signed up for the service.
On signing up (which involves getting an API token and setting the topics the notifications appear under), publishers embed a Wave badge, customizable with a specific background and foreground, a company logo and thumbnails on their pages. Note that in order to sign up, publishers are required to provide e-mails associated with the specified site.
Followers who decide to opt in can just click on the badge. All the subscribed notifications will be displayed within a single app. If the desktop app hasn’t been installed yet, the click on the badge will result in a seamless download of the necessary software. Wave is designed to bypass issues related to e-mail-based subscriptions such as the accumulation of newsletters and group notifications, as well as spam and phishing.
Now the valid question to ask is what distinguishes Adobe Wave from other widgets, and RSS in particular, because as soon as you hear “feed” you think “rss”. Wave’s terminology inventory does in fact include feeds, although these, as I gather from what people are saying, acquire a different meaning. First of all, there are two types of feeds available with Adobe Wave – (1) broadcast and (2) point-to-point notifications, that allow for extended opportunities for publishers to reached targeted categories of their audiences. Second, Adobe Wave is a push notification service, as opposed to RSS, which relies on polling – that means, with Wave, you will be immediately notified of any changes in the category you are monitoring. Note the latter part – for instance, it is possible to subscribe to the “fine-grained” type of notifications, such as Facebook status updates. Another thing people are predicting is a considerable degree of likelihood of streaming media support – and that, my friends, is a completely different can of worms.
Given the beta status of the project, it’s still open for tweaks and enhancements. The issues referred to as of now (in the usability department) concern (a) the add button website gallery and (b) the cumbersomeness of the badge perceived by some of the early users.
(a) One of the first things publishers notice is that their notifications do not appear in the Adobe Wave gallery, although the impression you normally get is that the gallery is supposed to include any of the sites using the service. In fact, it includes only a selection of sites picked by Adobe, which makes sense since it wouldn’t be great to clutter a button with lots of items, but is still quite confusing. Anyway, the Wave team is still working on workarounds, such as categorizing publishers or introducing a voting system of some sort.
(b) Is the badge ugly? Well, not so much, but the footprint it takes is really sizeable since the service also handles downloads. The potential solution is a badge hosted by Adobe, with just a URL provided, and the one on hand right now is linking an image to a separate page for opt-ins (you can see the info here).
Additionally, some valuable tips based on personal Wave installation experience are to found at http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2009/7/28/My-experience-with-Adobe-Wave. Have fun and give a shout about what you think of Wave.
Update: There is a Wordpress Wave plugin available.
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